Saving the Arts May Also Save Students

It started when the school play became a once-a-year event. Then elementary schools silenced their music programs, and art classes were erased one by one. Now you’re lucky if your child brings home a macaroni drawing once a week.

It seems the arts are vanishing from our schools. But with all the recent innovations and the emphasis on scientific discovery, isn’t it natural that American schools take less time for finger-painting and more time preparing students to live in a technology-driven world?

On the contrary, says a University of Arkansas professor, schools that neglect the arts do so at their own peril.

Claire Detels, professor of music at the U of A, blames dwindling arts programs for contributing to the social turbulence that eddied through American schools in the 1990s. She suggests that everything from student apathy to school shootings indicates a lack of fundamental values within the education system.

If America hopes to avoid the tragedies that plagued the last decade, it must make a greater effort to teach young people an appreciation for life and living, Detels asserts. And that’s where the arts and humanities can make their biggest impact. Because these subjects emphasize sensation, interpretation, creativity and expression, learning about the arts inspires students to think more deeply about their own lives and the world around them.

"Arts education doesn’t teach a particular set of values or support a particular creed, but it encourages students to think about what’s important to them and to respect that there is never just one interpretation," said Detels.

In other words, the arts not only serve as a creative outlet for students to explore their own thoughts, but they also teach young people to be more receptive to the ideas and interpretations of others. Anyone who’s ever tried to reason with a teenager understands the value of that.

Yet in spite of these benefits, art programs are often the first to be cut from the curriculum when funding runs low. Detels suggests that the problem has little to do with students - and little to do with funding as well.

Instead, she believes the problem is rooted far deeper, in the way the American education system is organized. Detels recently published a book on the matter, called Soft Boundaries: Re-Visioning the Arts and Aesthetics in American Education.

From kindergarten to college, the education system divides itself into multiple, independent disciplines - subjects like biology, literature, history and math. In Soft Boundaries Detels explains how this rigid organizational framework has cut off communication between the disciplines, failing to acknowledge the influences and interconnections that exist between different subjects.

"I want to challenge the long-standing model of American education that says specialization is best in all disciplines," Detels said. "My book shows how the hard boundaries between disciplines have harmed our coverage of the arts, and it proposes an integrative approach that reinstates arts and aesthetics into general education."

In the hard-boundaried system art becomes isolated, and its role in history, literature, philosophy and politics becomes unclear. Separated from these other subjects, the arts seem less relevant. And that has been a major reason why the arts tend to get cut, said Detels. They’ve been taken out of their proper context.

Detels is not the first to identify this problem. In 1999, a consortium of education, arts, business and government organizations drafted the Goals 2000 National Standards for Arts Education. These guidelines recommended that arts education be integrated with other studies.

Though such a change seemed like a step in the right direction, the program failed when it reached the schools. Teachers couldn’t comply with the standards because they didn’t know enough about the arts to include them in a discussion of other subjects.

This failure highlighted another problem. Teachers are the product of the same hard-boundaried education system that students face today. So if a change is to be made, it must be in the way that teachers are trained.

"We have to give teachers the skills to address all aspects of what they teach. If they feel like they don’t know anything about art, they won’t talk about art," Detels said. "The result of all this specialization is that subjects like history and philosophy end up devoid of the things that make them most interesting."

According to Detels, the hard-boundaried system must be replaced with soft boundaries that allow educators to focus on a given subject while also teaching about interconnections with other disciplines - particularly art.

Isolation of the arts from other subjects has contributed to their marginalization, but the problem has been amplified by another effect of the hard-boundaried system. Rather than studying the arts as a whole, schools have fractured them into separate disciplines - music, visual arts, dance and theater.

According to Detels, this not only gives students a fractured view of artistic expression, but it also makes art programs easier to cut from the curriculum. School officials faced with a budget crisis may find themselves weighing music against dance. They may not realize that cutting either will limit students’ exposure to the creative world, said Detels.

Rather than designing an education system that neglects concepts like beauty, expression and creativity, schools should be striving to create an environment where students learn to experience the world and appreciate their lives.

"Everyone needs to study the sensory, experiential realm and the impact that it makes on our physical, emotional and intellectual lives," Detels said. "That’s what makes the arts relevant."